Call centers provide a wide array of services for customers of the companies that use them. Through a call center, a company can service customers around the world, around the clock. The essence of call center effectiveness and efficiency, however, is the performance of the call center service representatives or agents that serve the calling customers. Call center supervisors manage call service representatives and are responsible for monitoring their performance. Call center supervisors monitor service representatives' telephone calls for three reasons: (1) to provide training to the customer service representatives, (2) to assure the quality of customer service, and (3) to maintain security within the company.
For a call center that uses an automatic call distributor (ACD) or PBX/ACD, there typically exist features that are integral to the ACD telephone system and that enable monitoring service representative performance. These capabilities, however, are generally manual and have significant limitations. For example, when a supervisor must schedule time periods to monitor their representatives manually the supervisor must remember when and for how long to monitor each representative. With other demands on their time and attention, supervisors may not be consistent or equitable in the ways that they monitor each agent. These inconsistencies and inequities may result in a supervisor monitoring an agent either for too little time or too much time, or too infrequently or too frequently. This may cause an imbalance in the supervisor's perception of an agent relative to other agents in the call center.
Another problem that manual scheduling and monitoring of agents causes is increased time pressure on the supervisors themselves. For example, they must remember who has been monitored, for how long they have monitored or intend to monitor an agent, and when to monitor the agent. If a call center has numerous service representatives, the requirement to monitor the performance of these agents may seriously and adversely affect the productivity of the call center supervisor. This is because the task of monitoring agents is only one of many tasks that the supervisor must perform.
Consequently, there is a need for a method and system that ensures consistency and equity across all agents and that provides a fair system for evaluating each agent's performance in servicing customer calls.
There is a need for a method and system that assists in reducing management pressure on call center supervisors and that permits them to increase their productivity by not always being concerned about the period of monitoring, the frequency of monitoring, or the time of monitoring as they perform their other managerial functions.
There is a further need for a method and system that permits call center supervisors to more effectively control the time at which they monitor the performance of the agents they supervise.